RV Solar Simplified! Simple RV Solar Setup.

0:00 I don't know about you but I still find it absolutely amazing that you can have your RV sitting in the Sun pulling power harvesting power from the Sun just simply amazing how's it goin welcome to another all about RVs today we're gonna be looking at a simple solar setup talking about how solar really is simple

0:24 oftentimes it can get confusing with so many different things of what types of panels mono versus poly versus flexible versus rigid versus MPPT versus PWM there's a lot of things out there so we have a very simple solar kit and I thought I would share it with you guys Solar can be a bit intimidating and

0:44 somewhat overwhelming so I hope simplifying it will help some out there that Sun is actually getting intense right now so let's head inside and we'll talk about just how simple solar is because it's really just another way to charge your batteries a typical solar setup is going to have a few main

1:02 components so let's start with the solar panels that are on top of the RV and then that's connected to your charge controller and the charge controller that is then going to connect to your batteries you're gonna put some fuses and some breakers on each side of that charge controller to protect your

1:19 equipment and your wires and that's really the basic gist of a solar setup to keep things working properly and to keep it safe I do have to admit it is more complicated or difficult to install it than it is to understand the concept but first you want to understand the concept so you can install a system so

1:37 we'll look at our system and how its installed so you can kind of get an idea what it takes to install just an average solar setup for your rig the kit that we have costs just under nine hundred dollars and it has four 100 watt panels that are up on the roof of the RV it came with the wire the mounting hardware

1:58 it also has the MPPT charge controller that has bluetooth so you're able to log into it and see what what the panels are producing how much is going into your batteries it's it's handy to be able to have that and then it has the wires and a few to do all of that safely and on the

2:17 battery side of things we have to battleborn batteries so we have two lithium batteries it's not a crazy huge system it's actually very average for what people install on their RVs when you plan to go solar there's some things you can do so you can plan for the future you don't have to have this big

2:34 system all at once right from the beginning so what does this system produce so if you pull up the app it'll tell you how many watts the system is producing so on a nice sunny day we can be getting usually we don't tilt our panels or anything we'll be pulling in between 20 to 24 amps

2:52 which is around 280 watts to about 340 watts somewhere in that range installing a system like this really isn't difficult I'd say the most difficult part is actually just running the wires getting them from the roof of the RV down to say one of the areas the storage areas where you might have your charge

3:12 controller or whatever Bay you're trying to get it to that's usually the hardest part is just running the wires so on our setup I just started by putting the mounting hardware right onto the solar panels they just bolt right on the the kit that came with this it's really a no frills kind of a bracket but it works

3:30 well and then it's just simply getting the panel's up there and laying them out and marking them where you want them to go and where you would like them on your roof I like to mark where each bracket is going to be in each screw hole that way I can get the Dicor underneath there so that when I'm putting my screw

3:45 through it pulls it down into that membrane the dike or product so it just gives it a nice tight seal in the box for the brackets there's actually the screws to be able to screw the panel's down to the roof even comes with a little rubber washer I wouldn't trust that rubber washer so I made sure I had

4:04 a tube of Dyke or so that I could cover up any of those penetrations because I don't want any leaks at all from installing solar we did buy an additional box to be able to get those wires from the roof down below and we actually positioned it for ours this is different than probably anybody else's

4:20 but we put it where we had an old solar setup so I just had to get it to where those wires were because I knew the gauge of that wire was thick enough to a accommodate the wires that I needed for this solar setup and of course I'll have a link down in the description to all the components that we use to be able to

4:36 make this system work we actually just used an MC 4 connector inside this box I know that that's waterproof but it got us to the existing wires that were there and we were able to make it all watertight for being able to come down into the RV just a quick side note you might see that these

4:52 panels are wired and parallel right now I'm doing that I'm experimenting and playing around with a few things I can wire this in series or parallel that's a different subject I actually have a video on some of that but from here we're going to take our wires from the panel's and we're gonna go down to a

5:09 fuse I called it a fuse but it's actually a breaker I like this I added this to the system because just with the press of a button I'm able to disconnect the solar panels from the charge controller and not have any power input coming from that so it's extremely simple and easy because you don't want

5:26 to hook up your charge controller to your panels until you've hooked it up to a battery that's usually the procedure on how you hook things up first your charge controller is going to connect to your batteries and then you're going to connect your solar panels to the charge controller so connecting the batteries

5:40 to the charge controller is pretty simple we're gonna have a fuse in between there so on the positive side coming from the charge controller would go to a fuse it's kind of hard to see where we have it mounted on ours and from the fuse we're gonna go to the positive side of the battery and on the

5:54 negative side since we have a battery monitor we go from the shunt to the charge controller if we didn't have a battery monitor with a shunt we would just go straight to the battery once you connect the charge controller to the battery it's actually going to power on it's gonna bring up the display and then

6:10 you can finish hooking it up from the solar panels to the charge controller you can turn on that little breaker be able to make that connection and then you'll see what is coming from the the panels and being able to go through to your batteries it really is that simple to install solar on your RV we will be

6:28 covering a lot of those other topics about sizing and different types of panels and flexible we're gonna cover all that but I just wanted to cover the basics of solar because it is really simple now let me give you some tips if you're wanting to get into solar but you have the budget or the time to be able

6:44 to get into the system that you hope to have someday so I would recommend getting a charge controller like an MPPT one that can handle different types of battery chemistry get like a 40 or a 50 amp charge controller that way your system can grow and you're not stuck it's a 15 amps or something like that I

7:03 would get one that can handle the the lead-acid if that's what you have now and maybe someday you hope to be able to go to a GM or lithium this one that we have it can do all the different types of battery chemistry which comes in handy charge controller that we have is actually a hundred and sixty-five

7:20 dollars just to give you an idea and for me I know this is a must but I really do like this one that has the app and it shows you a lot of the information that way you can be informed if you want to grow your system or if you just need to change a few things it really does help out it shows you the wattage that's

7:38 coming from your solar panels currently what's being sent to the charge controller what's actually making it into your batteries it really is nice to be able to have all that information in a nice easy place right at your fingertips so for us we have the four panels on the roof but we actually have

7:55 room that we added to 100 watt panels that we can pull out and we can tilt them towards the Sun say if our rig is parked in the shade and we hook it into this system it can handle that and it works well so if the rigs in the shade we can still get solar coming into the rig and along that same line of thought

8:11 if you're thinking about expanding the system on your roof in the future just size that wire appropriately that you're running from the top to the bottom because you don't want to have to do that twice I hope that this helps simplify solar for some and makes it a little less intimidating if you want to

8:27 look at an inverter or just using it as your normal DC loads you have lots of options of being able to use the energy from your batteries but solar is just an amazing way that you can put power into them without having to run a generator or plug-in or any of that kind of stuff so that's the beautiful part about solar

8:43 I hope that you enjoyed this video and that helped you if you want to see more videos about our Vieng hit that subscribe button and if we don't see you on the road hopefully we will see you in the next video [Music] I love doing this kind of stuff